A Magazine of Popular (and Unpopular) Culture
Starting in 1958, the sound of American pop music became heavily influenced by the aesthetic sensibilities of a single neurotic teenage boy from New York City. Phil Spector’s “Wall of …
Steve Albini: The Anti-Spector
There is a meme going around social media these days, shared chiefly among late Boomers and Gen Xers, featuring the image above, and bearing the legend: DON’T TELL ME ABOUT …
From Spiked Beer to Champagne
Burt Freeman Bacharach, a towering figure of American song, has passed at the age of 94. What can be said of the man that hasn’t already been codified in legend …
Bacharach to Basics
Americans now in their 50s grew up in a time of radical innovation at the intersection of public education and mass media. In the late 1960s, citizen groups such as …
Knowledge is Power!
Well, another year is just about in the can, and as usual, there is a long list of talented folks who have left us over the past twelve months. For …
In Memoriam 2022
In modern-day America, the hallmarks of middle age include, among many other signifiers, opening your mailbox to find that first mailer from AARP, noticing antique tags on cars that were …
Museum Pieces
Looking back on the 1980s today, the first thing I remember is the gleam of it all — the sterile, sleek sheen of a bold new pink-and-turquoise-hued future, molded in …
Perfect Sound Forever
In 2003 I was hired as managing editor of a startup free weekly paper in Wichita. F5 Weekly (RIP) covered music, movies, art, politics, etc., and the whole of the …
Secret Meetings: An Alternative Playlist
Music heads everywhere were stunned and saddened this week to hear of the passing of industry icon Mo Ostin, a man who somehow became one of the most successful music …
Thirty Songs in Memory of Mo Ostin
I grew up in the ’70s on the Cherokee Strip, right on the Kansas side of the Oklahoma border, and our hometown had a pork processing plant that employed many …
The Ballad of C.W. McCall